Raja Petra Kamarudin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Umno Youth's call for a revival of affirmative action for the Malays has stirred up a heated debate on the economic standing of the different races. But are the Malays far behind and are the Chinese as wealthy as popularly perceived? The Straits Times explores the issue.
THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY
By Carolyn Hong
Straits Times
Two weeks ago, taxi driver Azran Aseh was sitting outside his wooden squatter house in Kuala Lumpur when it caught fire.
In 10 minutes, he was homeless. He lost everything except for his taxi but is lucky because his family of five has since been re-housed in a council flat with a low rental of RM124 (S$55) a month.
Still, Mr Azran, 39, is worried. Although he works 15 hours a day, seven days a week, he can barely support his wife and three children.
Every cent he earns goes towards paying the RM1,200 monthly rental to the taxi company and household expenses of about RM1,500.
'I have no savings, and when my taxi breaks down, it's a real struggle,' he says.
His story is a classic example of poverty in Malaysia today.
Like the thousands trapped in a hand-to-mouth existence, he is not officially classified as poor but nevertheless is needy.
It is not abject poverty but their lives are equally precarious.
They may carry mobile phones and have televisions at home, but they cannot escape the trap of low education, poor prospects and insecurity.
Abject poverty, however, has become relatively uncommon, even in the rural areas.
Said Mr Juhaidi Yean Abdullah, an aide to Cabinet Minister Mustapa Mohamed, who regularly travels with his boss to the remote Jeli district: 'When I travel to the interior of Kelantan, I do meet poor people but none so poor that they cannot afford food or shelter.
'It's not abject poverty that we see today.'
He said poor families can still afford to send their children to school, and some even own livestock and land.
It is not so easy today to find people like Mr Atan Yasin, a cleaner in the city, who has to support a family of five on a monthly income of RM400.
Half of his salary goes to the rental for his squatter hut. His family is forced to scavenge for scrap metal at a nearby garbage dump to sell.
'We eat once a day, and sometimes I don't eat if there isn't enough food,' he said on a recent weekly television programme in which he appealed for public donations.
Less than 8 per cent of the population live like Mr Atan, below the poverty-line income of RM500-plus a month for a household of four to five persons.
And those with half of that income - the hardcore poor - account for only 0.4 per cent of Malaysians.
There are about 270,000 poor households, and about 12,000 hardcore poor in Malaysia.
That is a remarkable achievement. Just 35 years ago, half of the nation's population was living below the poverty line. However, some say the real picture may not be so cheery as the cut-off point is set unrealistically low.
Thirty years ago, most of the poor Malaysians were the Malays but this is not the case today.
The gap is steadily closing with the other races as the income of the Malays grow, although equality has yet to be achieved.
What is widening, however, is the intra-ethnic disparity - the gap between rich and poor Malays.
There are Malays like Mr Atan who earn RM400 a month, and there are Malay tycoons who travel in helicopters.
In the late 1990s, the Gini coefficient - a measure of income disparity - showed the intra-ethnic disparity to be the highest among the Malays, compared to other races.
This gap had widened each year in the 1990s while the opposite was true for the other races.
The 1990s was a time when many Malay tycoons were created through affirmative action policies under the New Economic Policy (NEP), which officially ended in 1990 but continued in spirit.
It has long been pointed out that income inequality must now be tackled by moving away from purely ethnic-based approaches.
However, this does not seem to be the order of the day. When Umno Youth recently proposed the revival of the NEP, it focused on the inequality between races, and the debate has since stayed in that direction.
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Posted by Raja Petra Kamarudin to MT-news at 8/21/2005 08:20:00 AMExtending NEP smacks of moving goalposts - A Chinese View
By Carolyn Hong
Straits Times
For more than 20 years, a group of 30 Chinese farmers has been growing vegetables on farms in Ulu Yam, Selangor, about an hour's drive from Kuala Lumpur.
They may earn a decent living but theirs is a life of uncertainty. 'It's a hard life, they are not poor but sometimes, they can't even recover costs when the price of vegetables falls,' said Federation of Vegetable Growers Association secretary Chan Loy Onn.
He knows the farmers' hardships well, having helped them with their biggest problem - the fact that they don't own land.
Some hold temporary occupation licences which can be revoked at any time, but most of them work illegally on government land.
They were almost evicted last year when the Selangor state economic agency wanted the land for housing but they fought back with the help of opposition politicians.
They won, and the state has now agreed to lease the land to them. The tenacity of these farmers would be taken as a point of pride by the Chinese community, given their struggle for economic survival all these years without a helping hand from the government.
They see this as resilience and adaptability.
'The incidence of poverty among the Chinese is lower, and this is partly because of the way they have employed economic strategies,' said Dr Lim Hin Fui, a social anthropologist who has written books on the Chinese new villages.
About one million Chinese still live in the 450 new villages that were built nationwide in the 1950s during the Emergency to break communication links between the communists and the rural population.
Most of the people are in the lower-income group, especially in villages where only the aged and very young remain.
But even among this group of poorer Chinese, there was little opposition when the New Economic Policy (NEP) was implemented from 1970 to 1990.
It was aimed at helping the Malays to catch up but marginalised the new villagers who may not have accepted it wholeheartedly but understood its role in terms of national stability.
But when Umno Youth called for a revival of the NEP recently, the idea went down with a dull thud - Malaysia is not what it was in the 1960s when the Chinese were disproportionately wealthier than the Malays.
Today, the two groups are closer in economic standing. There is also a strong belief that Malay achievement is higher than popularly perceived, while there has been a slowing of growth in Chinese achievements.
Income and employment statistics show the Chinese are still ahead of other races but nowhere near pre-NEP levels.
Before 1970, for example, Chinese household income was more than double that of Malays'. By 2002, the income disparity ratio had narrowed to 1:1.7, with mean monthly household income at RM2,376 (S$1,050) for Malays and RM4,279 for Chinese.
The number of registered Malay professionals such as doctors, lawyers and engineers has leapt from 4.9 per cent in 1970 to 31 per cent, while the percentage of Chinese professionals has dropped from 61 per cent in 1970 to 54 per cent today.
Furthermore, there are doubts about whether Malay ownership of corporate equity has actually stagnated at 19 per cent for the past 20 years, well below the target of 30 per cent.
Academics have suggested that the target was reached years ago, but the dispute continues because there is no consensus on the calculation method.
To the Chinese, there can be no reviving the NEP because Malay achievement has been remarkable, according to a Chinese think-tank researcher who declined to be named.
There is much apprehension because Umno Youth's new NEP envisages extension of the 30 per cent principle to new areas where the Chinese have a slight edge.
Its main proponent, Mr Khairy Jamaluddin, Umno Youth deputy chief and son-in-law of the Prime Minister, has said the principle should also cover biotechnology, intellectual property, income and property ownership. To the Chinese, this smacks of shifting the goalposts.
'It is time to move away from this kind of micro-restructuring,' said the think-tank researcher.
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Posted by Raja Petra Kamarudin to MT-news at 8/21/2005 08:19:00 AM
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